


and the universe is forgetting you

by exhaustedwerewolf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (a smidge), (mostly just imagery but still), Angst, Anxiety, Blood and Gore, Body Dysphoria, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dark, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Nogitsune Trauma, One Shot, Pack Feels, Panic Attacks (Referenced), Post-Nogitsune Stiles Stilinski, Suicidal Ideation, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 03:27:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18160868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exhaustedwerewolf/pseuds/exhaustedwerewolf
Summary: So, Stiles thinks, as distantly as he can, examining the thought like it’s something cold and unalive that he can turn over in his hands. His… or more accurately, "this," body.(Whoever’s it is.)This body will be new again in seven years.-Stiles' old body, and his new one. Things that are permanent, things that aren't, and his lack of a say in any of it.





	and the universe is forgetting you

**Author's Note:**

> You are atoms, and your atoms are not caring if you are existing. Your atoms are monstrous existence. - The Sky Cat, Night in the Woods.

After the nogitsune Stiles thinks about the number seven.

He doesn’t know where he first heard it, but he’s known it for a long time- that at the rate cells regenerate, your body effectively replaces itself every seven years. Yeah, that’s simplifying it a lot, but for whatever reason, the number seven has wedged itself in his brain.

It’s often presented as a phoenix from the ashes sort of thing. (Or a werewolf from the worm infested dirt, he thinks.)

People say it like it is some source of sanctuary, to know that you will be new again- if you live to see your cells die and be reborn. In seven years, whatever has happened to you, did not happen to _this_ body, and so in some small way, happened to someone else, someone from a long time ago.

Wherever they touched you, wherever they hurt you- that stretch of skin has ceased to exist.

So, Stiles thinks, as distantly as he can, examining the thought like it’s something cold and unalive that he can turn over in his hands. His… or more accurately, _this_ body.

(Whoever’s it is.)

This body will be new again in seven years.

(Assuming, because it _isn’t_ the old one- how can it be- that it still works in the same way. Which, yeah, he’s going to have to assume, as much as it makes his throat tighten up, there’s not exactly anyone he can just _ask_ , is there, so yeah, he’ll- he’ll assume. Assume that he’s awake, and this isn’t just the longest and most torturous of the dreams so far, that he isn’t going to wake up with a stranger’s voice bubbling from his own throat like vomit. Assume that he’s alive right now, and this isn’t just his broken brain’s last fireworks show of neurons, as Peter’s bite twists him to breaking, as Matt puts a bullet through his brain, as he goes up in flames and gasoline or choking on ice water beside Scott, as he plunges a sword through his own-)

(Yeah.)

(He’s going to have to assume.)

As a kid, he’d hated the seven year rule the moment he’d heard it, because he’d heard it sometime _after._

(No one ever seemed to get that, either, how his life ruptured, was rent into the time _before_ and the grotesque, impossibly fast-growing _after,_ doubling and quadrupling endlessly, like tumorous cells.)

It struck him- nine years old, sleepless and sick with grief- as unfathomably awful, the idea that in seven years time, he would become someone who had never existed in her space.The hand that held hers as she lay in that hospital bed would wither and drop from his wrist, and he’d be as good as a stranger to a person he’d once been a _part_ of. Or worse than a stranger, because at least, once, a stranger’s nerves would have pulsed with lightning in synchronicity with hers.

He does what he always does when faced with a monster, which is to try to learn its shape. It’s through reluctant, compulsive research, done in fits and starts when his Dad isn’t around to look over his shoulder- that he confirms that the seven year rule is a simplification- that within a month, he would already have shed any micrometer of skin that might have ever brushed against hers.

Maybe it is the inevitability of this, the inevitability of rot and decomposition. Or worse, of growth, of new blood cells and of auxin leaking into existence the way the small hours of the morning drip-drip-drip past as he lies awake dreading the alarm.

Maybe it is the lack of control in it, this mutiny of the body- the one that really was supposed to be his, against his mind, against himself.

The cells behind his eyes however, he learns, he gets to keep. They caught the light coming off her, he tells himself. Those cells become proof that she was here.

(The cerebral cortex, the website he’s scrolling through informs him, in a bullet point beneath the paragraph about rod and cone cells, doesn’t regenerate either. He doesn’t know how that makes him feel. Dead. Scraped out. He closes the tab, and then his eyes, for just a moment, and then he powers down the computer and drags himself back to bed.)

In 2004, the heart was still a question mark, but by time time he is fourteen years old, the world knows- it is only _partly_ permanent.

(In the medical field, this is great news. If you want to grow a new beating heart, this is great news. To the boy sitting with his phone on the steps outside his middle school and chewing up the tip of a ballpoint pen, well. It feels like _news,_ that’s all he can say for certain.)

Still, he holds onto the number seven, because at first, it feels like long enough- he is ten, eleven, twelve, and his time isn’t up yet- he tells himself he cannot feel himself getting further away from her.

He holds onto her light that came into his eyes, _their_ dark brown eyes-

He holds onto the oldest fractions of his inconstant, always-racing heart.

(He holds, perhaps most dearly, onto that which killed her- his cerebral cortex- a hold that aches like a fist enclosed around frost encrusted metal. This, he can’t explain, even to himself, but he cannot bring himself to let go.)

And _then-_

A weeks long drowning in foaming, ice cold black rapids- but the darkness of the water is the strange lightlessness of exhaustion, and the crashing of the waves becomes the roar of the MRI machine and the current twists and wrenches him until gravity is gone entirely- Eichenhouse and the hospital and the empty chemistry lab are just rippling glimpses he catches when he’s not snatching agonised gasping breaths- as searing, as bone-breaking as the teeth of the bear trap, the whine of the spinning drill- the ribbons of water against his skin like Scott’s blood slick on his hands after he slid the sword in, and when he surfaces, finally, lungs on the verge of collapse-

As if He knew- which maybe He did, considering He was in his head, spreading like sickness through his veins and like rot through his brain-

As if He knew how much it would hurt-

He takes them.

Those last few marrow cells. His eyes, his heartbeat, his _head,_ his stupid, broken, kamikaze brain-

Just like that, the curse twisted. The wording of the wish exploited.

This- it’s so much worse then just being hollow- like his organs have been scraped out and replaced with someone else’s, misassembled, stuffed into all the wrong cavities. His reflection is fine- on the _surface,_ this body looks right- but he’s relieved the first time he notices he still bleeds red, still bruises black. It’s at least some sign he’s still saltwater and bone, on the inside, not just black viscous liquid or a swarm of buzzing, writhing flies.

Still, all that was left of her legacy, all that was left of her touch against him, is taken at once. The parts of him that are permanent are no longer sacred, but dark masses of blight he would cut from his insides if he were stupid or maybe brave enough.

In seven more years, if he lives that long- _yes_ , this body will be _mostly_ new, but some percentage of his marrow, most of his heart, will still be His creation. All of the new cells behind his eyes, all of his fucking accursed cerebral cortex-

Are his memories of her- of anyone- even real, if they didn’t take root in _this_ brain? Even if these memories are clones- as perfect copies as plant cuttings interred in new soil- they’re not the original. (There’s always a risk of mutation _,_ some teacher had said that, or maybe it had been Deaton-) If memories make a person, because who is Stiles if he isn’t the idiot who told Lydia she’d win a Nobel Prize for mathematics, the kid who stuck his hand out of the window of the jeep no matter how many times his mother smiled and told him to stop- If that’s not him, then where did that person go? Was the real Stiles crumbled to ash and dust along with Him, on the floor of the school corridor- that spot that still sends a shiver through him every time he passes it?

(All he has is that symbol- _oneself_ \- and that’s a comfort for a while, until he decides, of _course_ he decides to find out more _,_ sabotages himself, always so fucking curious, isn’t he- and that’s when he’s faced with the second meaning- _itself._ )

So.

He resists the urge to wrench himself open- when he wants to check, or just to rip apart this alien vessel he never asked for- even though it’d be so easy, even though it’s just as weak and twice as hateful as the last.

And there’s nothing he _can_ do but assume.

He gets the beginnings of a sunburn from his stint in Mexico, the same weekend he gets a scar on his finger from hammering at the hood of his jeep (okay, that one he probably deserved.)

He takes in light- his father at the kitchen counter, turning at the sound of Stiles’ footfalls, the scarlet flash of Scott’s widening eyes as the movie’s predictable cheap jumpscare gets the better of him- Kira’s answering laugh at catching it, Lydia’s subtler but still not quite suppressed smile, the shifting of Malia’s gaze from the screen, expression intent on figuring out what she’s just missed.

No-one else hesitates, not _once_ \- to pound him on the back, to take his hand to tug him towards or drag him away from the mystery of the day.

Ropeburns at Eichenhouse to match Lydia’s.

Crumbled plaster under his nails and under Malia’s claws as they tear through the walls of the lakehouse to reveal the deadpool.

New memories, to heal and to haunt, take root, unwind and branch outward- a world tree within.

He tries not to think about it. And when he does he reminds himself that he is _making_ it his.


End file.
